With all of the recent drama that has been going on in some of the more esoteric circles that I’ve moved in, and with all of the recent life upheavals that I’ve undergone, I finally accepted the fact that a lot of the beliefs that I had been clinging to over most of my adult life are probably bullshit. I started out wanting to believe certain things when I was a teen getting into Chaos Magick and Modern Ceremonial Magick, and ended up just glomming on to the things that seemed most similar to the group that I started out in, which imploded.

When those groups imploded too, I finally began to see a pattern. I realized that I was being attracted to certain types of personalities that were parasitic and implosive, and whose influence was maybe detrimental to my development as a person. I had to accept that I’m temperamentally unsuited to working in certain kinds of groups, anyway. And it follows that if one just looks for the information that confirms what one wants to believe, one ends up screening out any new pertinent information that could change the whole game.

However, I have encountered a lot of concepts and ideas that I have liked, and have worked for me; so over the past year or so, I have basically been trying to determine what is bullshit, what works, and what does not. I have determined that I work best when I act independently and do my own thing, and so that is what I’ve resolved to do from here on in.

I’ve had to re-evaluate everything I believe about Magic(k).

The current mindset in America today is rife with magical thinking, which is taking our country down a path that is dark and frightening. Philip K Dick had a saying: “Reality is that which does not go away when you stop believing in it.” There seems to be a large subset of folks in this country who believe that they can ignore the scientific data that we are headed for environmental collapse if we do not do something to arrest the trend towards climate change, that we are headed towards more economic trouble if we don’t do more to regulate our financial system and stop the folks on Wall Street who treat our economy like it was a casino, that one can “pray the gay away” and that everything nasty that they claim about folks who believe differently than they do is true, without any actual observation or analysis of any of these actual situations or persons.

None of this has anything to do with the occult as it is actually practiced, but I had a wake-up call and realized that I don’t want to structure my belief system like this. I don’t want to have a mindset that does not take hard data into account – that there are things that are verfiably true, things that are verafiably not true, and just ‘believing’ in something does not make it so. Science depends on peer review and analysis of data. It’s not just an ‘alternative’ to other religious belief systems. Most of what I have seen of actual working Magick seems to confirm Terry Pratchett’s concept of Headology.

Chaos seems to state that because reality is perceived differently by everyone, you won’t get two accounts of anything that will line up enough to be objectively measured. It is part and parcel of the Chaos Magician’s experience to be able to entertain paradoxical belief systems in one’s head simultaneously in the course of being a practitioner. This just goes with the territory. And this is becoming more difficult for me to do as a lot of the things I have believed in have been proven wrong in the course of my own experience.

Helena Blavatsky seems to have kept reiterating that the Hindus have come closer than anyone to actual universal truth. I’ve had a lot of syncrhonistic encounters with people this year, in which folks are suggesting that events in Hindu mythology can be seen as metaphors for actual Scientific phenomena. One example: the concept of Maya expressed in the conflict between Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind over the Black Hole Information Paradox. (I.E. are we actually experiencing the physical universe, or a holographic experience of the physical universe?)

I guess the fact that I’ve rebooted this site again and kept it going means that I am still trying to figure out what I believe personally about all this. And that those beliefs are still fluctuating from day to day.